The story of how an Iranian businessman helped his country develop the world's largest natural gas field, got involved with the president's depraved son, and ended up fighting for his life.

A guard stands watch in Tehran's Evin Prison / Reuters

Older Iranian homes usually have traditional squat toilets, porcelain
holes in the ground with overhead flush tanks. So do the torture chambers in Tehran's
Evin prison, as Houshang Bouzari discovered on a sweltering summer night in
1993. His interrogator pulled Bouzari out of his six-by-four-foot cell and
forced him to crawl down the bloodstained stairs that lead to the basement of Section
209 -- the cell block reserved for political detainees. When they reached the
basement, the interrogator lifted Bouzari up from the ground and pushed him
into a tiny bathroom stall. The squat toilet was clogged.

Bouzari was forced onto his chest and the officer's boot
pressed against the back of his neck, plunging his head into the porcelain hole.
Bouzari immediately decided that if only he could stop breathing, he might
actually withstand this. Sealing his mouth shut, he held out for what he
believes was a full, excruciating minute. Then, instinct took over, and he
breathed in gulps and gulps of excrement-ridden water. His choking and muffled screams
gave way to a newfound peace; he was on the verge of passing out. The moment
before relief, he felt his body being lifted. A sharp blow cracked against his
back and Bouzari's mouth emptied onto his chest. He was pushed against a wall,
facing his tormentor. "Look what you've done, you sonofabitch," the officer
howled. "You've shat all over yourself. How are you going to pray in this
filthy state?"

Ablutions and daily prayers were the last things on
Bouzari's mind as he passed out. When he finally came to, the stench was so
overpowering that he no longer sensed it. The officer was still hurling verbal
abuse. A powerful notion flashed across his mind. "If this is torture, I can
take it," he told himself. If this is torture,
you can take it. But Evin's practiced torturers would soon prove him wrong.
This was just the beginning of an eight-month ordeal in the nightmare-lands of
the Iranian security system. By the time his interrogators were through with
him, he would confess to having spied for five separate foreign intelligence
agencies and much more.

Bouzari's plight was all the more remarkable because he was a
chosen son of the ayatollahs, Iran's spiritual and political leaders. Had he
played his cards right, he may well have wound up a minister or ambassador of the
Islamic Republic. The story of Bouzari's rise and fall bears the hallmarks of
classical tragedy: ambition and greed, friendship and betrayal, and the
resilience of the human spirit in the face of unspeakable cruelty. But it also
contains many of the same elements that dominate headlines about Iran today: from
the fissures at the very top of the regime to the unscrupulous Western
businesses that still invest in a regime that is brutal, isolated, and heavily
sanctioned. It is a story whose chief villains are well-known in Iran: then-President
Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his son and political heir, Mehdi.

• • • • •

Houshang Bouzari was born in 1952 to a respected clerical
family. Both of his grandfathers were jurists, interpreters of Iran's Shi'a
Islam. Bouzari's father was a civil servant in the shah's secularist regime,
but a pious man who passed that belief on to his children. As a student,
Bouzari straddled the secular and clerical realms, earning a journalism degree
in 1971 and a physics degree in 1974, all while also undertaking seminary
studies. Like many youth from Iran's emerging middle class, Bouzari studied abroad.
In 1978, he earned a physics doctorate from Turin University in Italy, where he
flirted with some of the same leftist ideas that were just then boiling over in
Iran. The next year, a popular revolution ousted the shah and established the
Islamic Republic.

Houshang Bouzari

Bouzari rose meteorically on his return to
post-revolutionary Iran, fueled by strong credentials: academic brilliance,
clerical pedigree, and anti-shah militancy. In 1981, he started work at the Majlis,
Iran's parliament, as an international affairs advisor to then-parliamentary
speaker Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Bouzari, still in his late-twenties, wrote
two or three speeches per month for Rafsanjani and accompanied the pistachio mogul-cum-mullah
on his trips abroad. "The travel opportunities were amazing," Bouzari told me
in one of our many interviews about his life. "I went on about 50 trips abroad
during this period. Vienna became a second home for me." He got close enough
with Rafsanjani to learn his boss's real last name: Bahremani.

He was soon recruited to advise the National Iranian Oil
Company (NIOC), one of Iran's wealthiest and most powerful bodies. By 1988, he had
dozens of friends inside the government. But as the war that had broken out
with Iraq in 1980 drew down, Bouzari soured on power. "I was privy to
information others didn't have," he told me. "I saw these guys torturing and
killing people. Summary trials and summary executions. I couldn't look at
myself in the mirror." He took a yearlong leave of absence. He told colleagues
he was seeking medical care abroad for his wife, but the real purpose was to
extricate himself from the Iranian regime and build a new life as a private
businessman.

I interviewed Bouzari, who now lives in exile in Canada with
his wife, for about 15 hours over the course of several weeks. Revisiting his
experiences in Tehran's torture chambers was extremely difficult for Bouzari,
who, after recounting particularly harrowing episodes, would sometimes request
that we stop the interview and pick up the next day. He agreed to speak with me
in part to show how Iran has changed over the last 30 years, how much more
corrupt and cruel its government has become. Several documents and records, produced
as part of an ongoing civil proceeding in the Canadian justice system,
corroborate what he told and help tell his story. Some of these documents are
already in the public record; others were made available to me on condition
that I not reproduce them. Still, even with these files, it's impossible to
independently verify all of Bouzari's claims.

When Bouzari decided to go on leave from his government work
in 1988, he was no doubt disturbed from seeing the regime's inner workings. But
as Nikahang Kowsar, a prominent Iranian-Canadian editorial cartoonist and
blogger familiar with his case, told me, a guilty conscience probably wasn't
Bouzari's only motive. "It's plausible that he was sick of how the regime
works," Kowsar said. "But he was also really smart and realized that, after the
war, there was a chance to make a lot of money."

The eight-year war had devastated Iran's oil industry.
Production had shrunk from a shah-era peak of over six million barrels of crude
per day to under two million barrels, almost half of which were marked for
domestic consumption. The country desperately needed to repair its damaged oil
infrastructure, and Western oil and gas contractors were eager to help. Armed
with technical knowledge, political savvy, and powerful connections, Bouzari
was the perfect middleman. "I understood the oil industry: pipelines,
compressing stations, refineries," he told me. "So I thought I could create a
link between the Iranian end user and the international oil companies."

Along with an Italian partner, Bouzari set up a consulting
company in Rome. By 1989, his civil servant status at state-run NIOC had lapsed
and he had transformed himself into an international businessman with few
official ties to the regime. He was jet-setting between Rome, Geneva, and
London and underwriting a lavish life for his wife and two young children. Within
months, his company was getting involved in hydroelectric dam building, airport
construction, and other heavy-duty industrial projects.

Business was already booming when, late one night in 1990
while rummaging through old NIOC documents stored at his house in Tehran,
Bouzari came across an appraisal memorandum addressed to the pre-revolutionary shah's
oil ministry. Back in 1976, engineers with the offshore drilling giant Reading
& Bates (now Transocean) had explored a natural gas condensate field shared
by Iran and Qatar. The field, the engineers had concluded, was one of the
richest light gas reserves in the Persian Gulf. The memo referred to the project
as the "Qatar North Dome." The name stung Bouzari's sense of Persian pride. During
a late night brainstorming session over pizza and non-alcoholic beer, he and a
close Tehran-based associate coined a new name for the project: South Pars. The
name would become one of the global energy industry's most famous; South Pars
is the largest gas field in the world.

• • • • •

Ayatollah Rafsanjani, Bouzari's old boss, had just been
elected president of Iran. Though today's Iran is dominated by Supreme Leader
Seyyed Ali Khamenei, Rafsanjani was then by any measure the most powerful man
in the country. Khamenei had only recently replaced Ruhollah Khomeini as the
religious Supreme Leader and was widely viewed as lacking sufficient
theological or jurisprudential training for the job.

Bouzari believed that his former colleagues at NIOC would be
unlikely to support his South Pars idea. Too many of them were focused on
surviving the leadership transition and wary of risky new ventures. So he reached
out to his non-Iranian clients instead. "I went after a whole bunch of foreign
companies," Bouzari recalled. "I described the project and said, 'if you go
forward and suggest something to Iran, I will help you win the bidding
process.'" Several European and Japanese companies formed a consortium to do
just that. The major players included Technip (France), TPL and Saipem (Italy),
Machinoimport (Russia), and JGC and Chiyoda (Japan); Halliburton, from the
U.S., was a subcontractor. (A letter from TPL executives, introducing Bouzari
to the U.S. Embassy in Rome as a consultant, can be found here.)

After weeks of intensive negotiations with the Iranian
government, they reached an agreement that valued the project at $1.78 billion
and required the consortium to put up 90% of the initial costs. Bouzari had
been so central to the deal that, when the consortium decided to accept the
deal, the group's head called him directly from his private jet. "Dr. Bouzari,
you got it," he said, according to Bouzari. "You got it!"

Bouzari, who was set to collect a $35 million commission, popped
a champagne bottle.

Not long after both parties executed the letter of intent,
Bouzari, now back in Rome, received an unexpected phone call urging him back to
Tehran. President Rafsanjani had taken note of Bouzari's role in the lucrative
new project, the caller said, and sought an audience with his former aid. Having
successfully rebranded himself as a private entrepreneur, Bouzari was reluctant
to re-enter Iranian government circles. But this was an invitation he could not
decline. Three or so weeks later, he was in Tehran, seated across from Rafsanjani
and his son Mehdi. "Thank you for your patriotic initiatives related to South
Pars," the president began. "We are proud of you. But we have called you here
to discuss our son, agha-Mehdi here,
who has just graduated from college. He is very interested in maritime
industries, and you must help him learn the business."

From his days at parliament, Bouzari vaguely recalled
watching Mehdi as a child play soccer with Revolutionary Guard officers at the Majlis
compound. Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani, born in 1969, was now 21. "I will be Father's
eyes and ears in South Pars," he told Bouzari during their first of many mentorship
sessions.

Rafsanjani's fourth and youngest son, Mehdi, is by all
accounts the apple of the former president's eye. In memoirs published online,
Rafsanjani recalls his son's development with obvious admiration:

Mehdi was always interested in industrial
affairs. He understood that our position in the maritime economy was weak. He
sought to enhance our capacity to build underwater pipelines, and he helped
develop South Pars. Mehdi and my other children avoided confrontation. They are
not into secrecy and mendacity--whoever they are, they show it. They don't intrude
on matters that do not concern them. They do not enter politics but they are
always in the arena.

(Rafsanjani's site has since been blocked, but copies of the
memoir can still be found, and the relevant section can be downloaded here.) All
parents exaggerate their children's virtues. But the gap between the paternal
illusion and reality here may be especially wide. Former friends and associates
have described Mehdi as erratic, cruel, and even sexually depraved -- in other
words, the stereotypical son of a Mideast autocrat.

"You can fuck off and rot there for all I care. The children deserve better than you."

The Iranian dissident cartoonist Nikahang Kowsar, before he defected
to Canada under a death threat from a hardline group, served as media advisor
to Mehdi during the early 2000s. "He's smart and he's rude," Kowsar told me. "If
he knows you, he shares a lot of dirty jokes." Not unusual for the power-high offspring
of dictators, Mehdi is said to be a fan of psychological games. The Tehran neighborhood
where Mehdi lived at the time, for example, was home to a number of clerics.
"Mehdi would climb the walls of [other ayatollahs'] homes and use a big camera
to take pictures of, say, a group of them smoking opium," Kowsar recalled. "It
was a score for him. He loved messing with other people." Mehdi is rumored to
have an insatiable appetite for women. "I learned of his taste for women
because of the secretaries he used to hire," Kowsar told me. "You could tell
there was something in the air. You wouldn't see any of those secretaries
working for other governmental offices. So you could have a secretary wearing
perfume -- that's crazy in the Islamic Republic!"

Bouzari was eager to appease the young Mehdi, aware he could
scuttle the lucrative South Pars project with a snap of his finger. "The kid
was sexually starved," Bouzari remembered. "I decided that the best thing to do
is to entertain him. We'd send him from one industrial exhibition and five-star
hotel to another just so he was out of my hair." For the next few months, Mehdi
and his personal aid traveled the world at Bouzari's expense. One 1992 Hilton Genève
bill ran tens of thousands of Swiss Francs. Billed to Houshang Bouzari, the
receipt identifies the guest as one "M. Bahreman Yazdanpanahtazdi," an amalgam
of Mehdi's real last name and that of his aid. (Bouzari also claims he
bankrolled Mehdi's expensive escort habit in Iran and Europe during this
period.)

Appeasement would only go so far. In winter 1992, Bouzari
received a message from Mehdi's assistant: "Mehdi says you must gift him fifty
million dollars or he'll scrap the project." The exorbitant bribe demanded by
the president's son stunned him -- and far exceeded the $35 million he was set
to make from the deal. Bouzari did not make much of the threat until he got another
call, this time from Mehdi himself, announcing the formation of a new company,
the Iranian Offshore Engineering and Construction Co. (IOEC), which was to take
over all South Pars contracts from the oil ministry. "Doctor-jan," Mehdi addressed Bouzari lovingly.
"I will lead the board of directors and you will be the chief executive. Father
says this is the best path. I'm waiting for you to prep me for future meetings."
Bouzari received a memo announcing the formation of IOEC and listing Mehdi as
managing director, as well as six other Rafsanjani apparatchiks as board
members.

He should have cut his losses and moved on, Bouzari now
says. Instead, he made what he sees as the biggest mistake of his life. In May
1993, he flew to Tehran, hoping to change the Rafsanjanis' minds.

• • • • •

Bouzari started noticing suspicious signs as soon as his
plane touched down in Tehran. He was not greeted with the usual VIP welcome.
Mehdi was nowhere to be found, and Bouzari's attempts to reach him found
nothing. Then, late one night, a member of Mehdi's inner circle -- a bodyguard
who also owed Bouzari a favor -- rang his doorbell. When Bouzari opened the
door to let the man in, he lunged himself inside, pushed Bouzari into a nearby bathroom,
and turned on all of the faucets. Holding his right hand over Bouzari's mouth, he
spoke breathlessly: "Mehdi is on pilgrimage to Mecca. Doctor, you must get out
of Iran. Turn off the water after I leave." He was gone in less than a minute.

Bouzari was shaken, but he did not heed this or other
warnings. "I had friends everywhere in the security system," he told me.
"Nothing will happen to me, I thought." And then there was the matter of his hefty
consulting commission. "When you're going for a big job, you have to take big
risks."

Still, the warnings rattled Bouzari enough that he booked a
flight back to Rome, scheduled for the day after the next. In the meantime, he
went real-estate hunting with his closest Tehran confidant, a man named Said
Yazdani-Sabouni who at the time imported heavy equipment for the Revolutionary
Guards. After the day's business was over, they stopped by a bookstore, where
Bouzari picked up something to read on his upcoming flight. When Yazdani-Sabouni
saw the book's cover, he burst into laughter. It was the autobiography of Ehsan
Naraghi, an adviser to the shah's wife who, after the revolution, suffered a long
prison sentence in the ayatollahs' jails.

"That is so funny, brother," Yazdani-Sabouni told Bouzari
several times in between chuckles during dinner. "That is hilarious." The book
was titled From the Shah's Palace to Evin
Prison.

• • • • •

The irony of that title was lost on Bouzari -- but not on Yazdani-Sabouni,
who had been bought off by Rafsanjani's allies weeks before his friend's
arrival in Tehran. Entrusted with keys to Bouzari's apartment, Yazdani-Sabouni had
helped intelligence officers bug its rooms and tap all three of his phone
lines. Three intelligence officers used the information to track Bouzari's
every move for many days. They moved to capture him the day before he was to
fly out of Iran. That morning, the agents arrived at Bouzari's front door and
unceremoniously arrested him. Bouzari drove himself to Evin prison, accompanied
by the senior-most of the officers, where he was blindfolded and thrown into a
cell that he says crawled with "hundreds" of cockroaches.

During his first two weeks in Evin, Bouzari's interrogators assaulted
him constantly, part of a process of psychological breakdown that torturers
have used for centuries, but for which Evin is especially infamous. They would
slap his face with heavy rubber slippers -- 10, 20, sometimes 30 strikes in one
sitting. Each strike would leave his head ringing for several seconds; he could
often feel his ear canals bleeding. "Why are you beating me, my good man?"
Bouzari would plead with Siadati, the agent who arrested him. "Ask me anything,
and I'll tell you." But his begging was only answered with more intense violence.
Bouzari's head was twice plunged into a clogged toilet. This is when he first
developed the mantra, if this is torture, you can take it. But then Siadati stopped
showing up. Bouzari was mostly left alone for another two weeks.

One day in early July 1993, guards took him out of his cell
and moved him to the Towhid detention center in downtown Tehran. There, a particularly
cruel interrogator took charge of his case. It was this officer, who went by
the name Akbari Rad in Towhid, who introduced Bouzari to cable number three.

To flog detainees, Iranian interrogators use cables of
varying diameters: cable number one is the widest, number two a bit thinner,
and cable number three is the thinnest, about a quarter of an inch in diameter.
By concentrating the impact over a small surface area, it inflicts a massive
dose of pain with each blow.

"What's your shoe size?" Akbari Rad asked Bouzari early on.
"Forty-four," he responded sheepishly. "That's okay," Akbari Rad said calmly.
"I'll turn that into a comfy 48 for you." To this day, both of Bouzari's feet
are abnormally large, and he walks with some difficulty. Typically, Bouzari
would be stretched out on his back between two steel bars while his torturers
worked his thighs and feet. After about a dozen sessions, Akbari Rad and others
had beaten his feet into unrecognizable bags of purple flesh; all ten of his toenails
eventually fell off. He lost 50 pounds and consistently urinated blood.

After a few more weeks in Towhid, Akbari Rad informed Bouzari
that his wife had wired the intelligence ministry three million U.S. dollars.

• • • • •

Shortly after Bouzari's arrest, President Rafsanjani had
unilaterally terminated the South Pars contract. The government drew up a new
contract with the IOEC -- the quasi-public outfit founded by Rafsanjani's son Mehdi
-- as the consortium's major Iranian counterparty. Bouzari was cut out of the
development of the world's largest gas field. Now, to complete his excision,
the state appeared to be preparing Bouzari for a speedy trial in a
revolutionary court, probably on espionage charges carrying the death sentence,
the usual tool against high-level regime opponents.

This is most likely why Bouzari's torture sessions took such
an interrogatory character, and why they became so much more brutal. His
torturers started applying electric prods to his kneecaps, he says, his throat,
and his genitals. Bouzari readily confessed to having worked for the CIA, MI6,
the Mossad, Shin Bet, and the Italian intelligence service.

That was when his wife's wire transfer came through, and it likely
saved his life. (Faxed memoranda detailing the liquidation of three million
dollars of the Bouzaris' assets and the transfer of the resulting funds to the
Iranian ministry of intelligence can be read here and here.) Even before he embarked on
the South Pars consultancy, Bouzari was a very wealthy man. When Yazdani-Sabouni
called Bouzari's wife, Fereshteh, on the ministry's behalf to ask for five
million dollars to cover her husband's "hospital bills," she understood right
away. It took her less than 72 hours to sell off enough assets to send the
three million, not quite the sum demanded but still enough to satisfy the
ministry.

Initially, Bouzari was terrified to learn his wife had paid
out. "Once these guys smell money," he knew, "they will always want more." Ever
the businessman, Bouzari formulated a plan: he would convince his captors that
there was much more money for the taking, but that only he could liquidate and
deliver the assets.

As fall turned to winter and Bouzari's case meandered its
way to the courts, a new, turbaned torturer had appeared his cell. Gholam
Hossein Mohseni-Eje'i is one of Iran's most prominent intelligence officers. At
the time, he officially represented the revolutionary court at the ministry of
intelligence. He would later head the ministry, including during the brutal
crackdown after Iran's disputed 2009 election. Mohseni-Eje'i was most likely
present to collect Bouzari's confessions, which would also explain why the
physical torment was gradually abated.

This shift in treatment worried Bouzari; he sensed the
trial, and thus a probable death sentence, looming. He requested and was
granted a personal audience with Mohseni-Eje'i.

"If you send any codes or signals, I will blow your brains out right here."

"Haji, I have more
to confess," Bouzari told the intelligence officer, who is also a cleric.
"There are many more assets still on the other side [in Europe] and they belong
to the brothers here. But I fear my wife may have found a new lover and is
wasting the money away. You must let me travel to Rome to retrieve what rightly
belongs to the sacred regime." By this point, news of the three million-dollar
transfer had surely made its way around the intelligence ministry. Credit for
that score, Bouzari realized, belonged to Rafsanjani and his allies. By
offering this "confession," he hoped to play Mohseni-Eje'i against the Rafsanjani
faction. "Alright, alright, we will study the matter," the cleric soothed
Bouzari.

At Mohseni-Eje'i's behest, Bouzari was finally allowed to
call his wife. Two intelligence officers were listening on the call. Before
Bouzari dialed Fereshteh's number in Rome, one of the agents pointed a silenced
pistol to his head: "If you send any codes or signals, I will blow your brains
out right here." Bouzari's heart was racing. He would ask Fereshteh to send
more money but, for the plan to work, she would have to refuse. This would
allow Bourazi to argue that he must travel to Rome himself to sell his assets
and bring the money back. If it worked, he would fly out and never return. But
if she did as he asked and sent the money, then not only would Bourazi still be
in jail and facing execution, but his family would be poorer for nothing.

How could he make his beloved wife -- who had not seen him
for many months -- understand that she must spurn and spite him? He spoke
rapidly and in an emotionless voice: "Fereshteh-­jan, I need you to do follow my instructions very closely. I need
you to sell our apartment in Geneva, our property in England, my share in the
consultancy -- and our yacht."

The Bouzaris lived a luxurious life but they never owned a
yacht; Fereshteh was hydrophobic. Would she get the message?

The next time Bouzari called, Fereshteh unleashed a torrent
of insults: "What do you want from me, you piece of shit? I never should've
married you. My father always said you were nothing but trouble, and he was
right! You can fuck off and rot there for all I care. The children deserve
better than you."

• • • • •

Iran's intelligence officers and torturers are not fooled
easily, and it would take many more months of work before Bouzari convinced
them to move forward. Finally, in winter 1994, Mohseni-Eje'i had him released
-- still blindfolded -- in the middle of a busy Tehran street. He got in touch
with his wife, who, realizing that Bouzari was still not free and likely under
surveillance, continued to perform the role of the spiteful ex-lover.
Mohseni-Eje'i, after demanding a $250,000 cash advanced, returned Bouzari's
passport so he might recover "the brothers' millions" abroad. The plan had
worked.

"If you don't come back, we'll kill you," Mohseni-Eje'i told
him during their last meeting. "If you write a book about this, we'll kill you.
Maybe your children will have accidents." Then the cleric whispered the Koranic
traveler's prayer in Bouzari's ears, entrusting him to the care of the
Almighty.

In 1998, the Bouzaris made their way to Canada, where they
currently reside. There, Bouzari co-founded the International Committee against
Torture. In November 2000, he sued the Islamic Republic in a Canadian court
claiming damages for his torture. When the case was dismissed on sovereign
immunity grounds, his lawyers filed a new lawsuit in 2005. This time, he named
now-former President Rafsanjani, his son Mehdi, Akbari Rad, Mohseni-Eje'i (who
that year became head of the intelligence ministry), and other high-ranking
Iranian officials. Last August, the Ontorio Superior Court of Justice endorsed
the suit, concluding, "The plaintiff, Houshang Bouzari has endured unspeakably
outrageous torture by [Mehdi Rafsanjani] or at his instigation." In effect, the
court rendered a default judgment, ordering Mehdi to pay Bouzari $13 million in
damages. (A copy of the judgment, which Mehdi now seeks to set aside with the
help of the prestigious Canadian law firm Davis, LLP, can be found here.)

He was also closely involved in his father's failed 2005
presidential bid. "He felt that [Supreme Leader] Khamenei had somehow
politically raped his father," Kowsar, who declined Mehdi's offer to work on
his father's campaign, told me. "He wanted to get back at Khamenei." Today,
Mehdi is pursuing an Oxford doctorate in, of all subjects, constitutional law.

In 2009, the Rafsanjanis' threw their weight behind the Green
Movement. Many Western supporters of the Obama administration's engagement policy
embraced the family, resurrecting the idea that the "pragmatic" Rafsanjanis could
be a viable alternative to the crazed hard-liners. Bouzari doesn't see it this
way.

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Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.